Cushioning the fall of bad news
Angela Harris has been here in the hospital for six hours, awaiting the results of her CT scan. I won’t take responsibility for all of that wait time: complicated CT scans and labs do take a significant amount of time to perform. But she didn’t need to wait the last hour.
She was waiting on me — her emergency physician — because I needed to confirm her cancer diagnosis with radiology, arrange some oncology follow-up … and find the most appropriate phraseology for: “You have stage IV cancer, but you don’t meet admission criteria.”
I’ve delivered this diagnosis five times this year — and, ironically, always in that room. The cold, narrow one that echoes.
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Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/meghan-gaffney-liroff" rel="tag" > Meghan Gaffney Liroff, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Hospital-Based Medicine Oncology/Hematology Source Type: blogs
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